With grateful thanks to Philip Lucas, who kindly sent me his copies of the ancient documents described in and scanned for this piece.
A few months ago, when I wrote about redrafting the Students’ Union Constitution in the piece linked here and below…
…I received a surprising amount of correspondence about it. One very kind piece of correspondence from Philip Lucas, responding to my bemoaning the fact that I had a copy of the old constitution my labours were replacing but not the magnum opus I helped to produce, said:
…would you like my original copies of the 1984 Constitution and Standing Orders…? I am happy to post them to you.
Another, from Malcolm Cornelius, stated that he recalled working with me on proof-reading that revised constitution document. I remembered that too, when reminded. Heck, now that the document itself has arrived, we have documentary evidence that Malcolm’s assertion was true.
I sense that the document was produced over the Easter break that year, such that the proof-reading exercise, which extended to 34 pages of Constitution and 10 pages of Standing Orders, must have formed part of the “How Not To Revise” efforts that Malcom and I attempted jointly in April that year:
No wonder Malcolm and I were exploring ways of imbibing coffee and whiskey jointly too!
Many readers are no doubt itching to read bits of the 1984 Constitution and Standing Orders, not least because it is a proto-example of gender-neutral drafting.
I am in retrospect proud of myself for taking on such a dull yet useful task. I believe firmly that Malcolm Cornelius and I should qualify for Honorary Life Membership of The Dull Men’s Club by dint of having done this. I might even write to the doyens of that club requesting same. The only nagging question about that, of course, is whether Malcolm and I should insist on the club changing its name to “The Dull Persons’ Club” or “The Dull People’s Club” before we would accept the honour.
Parenthetically, and with characteristic proof-reading pedantry, I now far prefer the word “people” to the word “persons”, the former feeling more like flowing English to me, the latter feeling more like a sub-editor’s short-cut to a gender neutral word.
Back then we could have taken our lead from Depeche Mode, of all people, who were in the Top Ten around that time with the following hymn to diversity:
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